"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Let's Have Some Business Roundtable Reform to Close the Employment Gap

As Arne's pals on the Business Roundtable have perfected the use of the black-white test score gap in schools as an excuse to vilify educators and impose uniform and uniformed "no excuses" corporate chain gang schools throughout an impoverished urban America, the same Racists of the Roundtable continue to discriminate against those African Americans and other minorities who manage to survive their "educations" to get college degrees.

The New York Times piece today must be a rude awakening for those neo-libs naive enough to believe that Obama's election signals the imminent end of white privilege and racism. In fact, I would argue that the threat of a black man as President has made discrimination by white employers worse, especially in this era when casino capitalism has destroyed the economy, thus requiring more blatant techniques to insure the reproduction of white privilege.

So the next time you hear one of the equity managers or economist-lawyer types whine about bad, bad public school teachers and the achievement gap, remind him of the more significant and widening employment gap that teachers or school boards had no part in creating. Please take the time to do that before you spit in his face.

Johnny R. Williams, 30, would appear to be an unlikely person to have to fret about the impact of race on his job search, with companies like JPMorgan Chase and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago on his résumé.

But after graduating from business school last year and not having much success garnering interviews, he decided to retool his résumé, scrubbing it of any details that might tip off his skin color. His membership, for instance, in the African-American business students association? Deleted.

“If they’re going to X me,” Mr. Williams said, “I’d like to at least get in the door first.”

Similarly, Barry Jabbar Sykes, 37, who has a degree in mathematics from Morehouse College, a historically black college in Atlanta, now uses Barry J. Sykes in his continuing search for an information technology position, even though he has gone by Jabbar his whole life.

“Barry sounds like I could be from Ireland,” he said.

That race remains a serious obstacle in the job market for African-Americans, even those with degrees from respected colleges, may seem to some people a jarring contrast to decades of progress by blacks, culminating in President Obama’s election.

But there is ample evidence that racial inequities remain when it comes to employment. Black joblessness has long far outstripped that of whites. And strikingly, the disparity for the first 10 months of this year, as the recession has dragged on, has been even more pronounced for those with college degrees, compared with those without. Education, it seems, does not level the playing field — in fact, it appears to have made it more uneven.

College-educated black men, especially, have struggled relative to their white counterparts in this downturn, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate for black male college graduates 25 and older in 2009 has been nearly twice that of white male college graduates — 8.4 percent compared with 4.4 percent.

Various academic studies have confirmed that black job seekers have a harder time than whites. A study published several years ago in The American Economic Review titled “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?” found that applicants with black-sounding names received 50 percent fewer callbacks than those with white-sounding names. . . .